When Cruise’s autonomous cars get stuck, how can we get them unstuck as quickly and safely as possible?
The SPACE
Although Cruise’s autonomous cars boast an average of 12,221 miles of autonomous driving without any human intervention, it’s still far from perfect. What happens when the Cruise car is stuck, for example, when it encounters a parade or thick fog?
Remote Assistance is Cruise’s mission control center. Remote Assistance’s Advisors—trained humans who utilize a system called the “Terminal”—help the Cruise cars make the right autonomous choices or to provide alternative paths.
The core of Remote Assistance success is extreme accuracy and efficiency. Although 3 seconds in the real world is very short, 3 seconds stopped at a green light is a lifetime.
Time
5 months
2019 - 2020
Collaborators
1 PM
4 front-end engineers
10 back-end engineers
2 operations team managers
30+ Remote Assistance Advisors and Coordinators
Processes
Storyboarding
Wireframing
Redlining
Brainstorming
UX and Interactive Prototyping
User Research
User Interface Design
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Perception Override
Sometimes, the Cruise cars see objects like fog, steam, ahdsows, paint on the road, etc. as solid objects.
Remote Assistance’s Advisors uses a maneuver called “Perception Override”, which tell the Cruise cars which objects or parts of the road to ignore objects in.
Previously, the Perception Override maneuver took twice as long as other maneuvers, with more errors and incorrect usage. This redesign focuses on reducing mental load, human-errors, and increasing efficiency.
The redesign of Perception Override included overhauling the existing hotkeys and user flows, then designing new UI and animations.
Error Messages
Error messages are crucial for operators to understand their context and prevent mistakes. Cruise’s system of errors make sense to Cruise cars and their engineers, but are difficult to interpret by laymen.
How can Remote Assistant’s error messages be easy and quick to understand?
Camera Layouts
The Cruise car takes in information from radars, LiDars, and cameras. For Advisors in Remote Assistance, the camera feed is always their source of truth.
How can the camera feed be laid out so Advisors can quickly and accurately see the world around them?
Hotkeys and Shortcut Panel
Hotkeys are required to used many of Remote Assistance’s tools and are often faster alternative to clicking on on-screen buttons. However, not all Advisors use or remember all the hotkeys.
overhauled and redesigned
Redesigning hotkeys took a large initiative of redefining the hotkey system. It meant surveying Advisors, looking over all functions, and working closely with engineers. Then finally, updating the design of the hotkeys panel in the Terminal.